Saturday, June 26, 2010

The same weekend that we went to Half Moon Bay beach, we also went for a short hike to the top of Mt Davidson, the highest mountain in SF. At the entrance to the park I got surprised by this very interesting and very "American" sign:

On the first truly warm weekend in this year Anil, I and several thousands of other Bay Area inhabitants decided to hit one of the nearby beaches. Anil and I were hoping for a bit of quite time together on Montara Beach, but there was not a single free parking spot within two miles of it, so we had to drive further south, finally stopping at Half Moon Bay Beach. Expectedly, HMB beach was pretty crowded too. Still, walking there made us feel very grateful for our nice lives and having an opportunity of living in a such awesome city like SF, located within a very short drive to many beautiful places.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

I have already visited the Upper Antelope Canyon during my 2008 "Grand Circle" road trip with Agnieszka. But as Anil has not seen it yet, I thought that a quick stop at the other slot canyon, called *Lower* Antelope Canyon might be a fun thing to do for both of us.

If you have been there, you know that it is a pricey pleasure. The guided tour to the Upper Antelope Canyon costs $32 per person and the tour to the Lower Canyon costs $25/person. There are much less people in the Lower Canyon, which makes your experience much better and the photography much easier. The Upper Canyon might be slightly more picturesque, but I think now, after seeing them both, I would recommend a visit to the Lower one over the Upper one.

Below are photos from the Lower Canyon, and for comparison here are photos from the Upper one.

A rather surprising entrance to the Lower Antelope Canyon:

It is easy to get mesmerized by the shapes and colors of the rocks inside the canyon:

Saturday, June 19, 2010

One of the most spectacular and magical places that we visited during our honeymoon was White Sand Dunes NM. Unfortunately, it is also one of those places which beauty is difficult to capture on the photos, so you will have to trust my word here.

White Sand Dunes are very unique as contrary to most other dune fields they are made of gypsum, not quartz. This is also the world's largest gypsum field. Being made of the pure gypsum (hydrous calcium sulfate) these dunes are whiter than the purest snow we had ever seen. They also seem to be even better than snow at reflecting light, so even when the sun was hiding behind the clouds we still needed to wear sunglasses.

In the park we planned to go for a 4.6 miles (7.4 km) long hike to Alkali Flats, but we abandoned this plan due to extreme heat, no breeze and eye-blinding properties of the dunes. In retrospect it was a good idea as it is very easy to become disoriented in the dunes and even though we hiked only a tiny portion of that hike, we almost got lost... Luckily, the park marks all of its trails with orange posts buried in the sand and thanks to them we were able to retrace our way back to the car.

Here are several photos from the portion of Alkali Flat hike we did:

I still hope to be able to do this hike in its full length at other time point in my life, and maybe also along one of the monthly moonlight hikes offered by the park rangers.

Other hike that we did during our visit to White Sands was 1 mile (1.6 km)-long hike on Dune Life Nature Trail. It goes through the part of the dune filed that is more heavily vegetated, and hence also richer in desert animals (such as mice, lizards, snakes, insects, some birds). We did not see too many animals (I guess they were clever enough to hide from the heat), but we saw many animal tracks:

We followed this set of tracks to the nearby scrubs...

... and there was our reward, the Bleached Earless Lizard:

Some other animals and plants that we encountered in the dunes:

The tree (willow) that is still above the sand:

...and here some that already start to surrender to the dunes:

We also went for a short (0.5 km) Interdune Boardwalk, where I took these pictures:

Curio fact about the White Sand Dunes: the state of New Mexico introduced Oryx, a large African antelope to the Tularosa Basin (which includes the park) to establish a huntable big game population. How crazy! I have no idea what they were thinking. Or if they were thinking at all...

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Meet the author and the main protagonist:

Hi! Welcome to the blog of Monika, a world traveler, writer and photographer. You can find here some of my photos, as well as descriptions of my adventures from around the world. Enjoy reading and thanks for stopping by!